Glossary
Pre-Seed vs Seed in defense tech
Pre-Seed is typically pre-incorporation or pre-product money on the founding team alone; Seed follows a working prototype or an early government pilot.
In defense tech specifically, the line between Pre-Seed and Seed tends to track a company's first contact with a government customer more than it does typical SaaS milestones like signed revenue.
A Pre-Seed round is usually written against the founding team and an idea — often before there's a working prototype, and well before any contract or pilot. A Seed round more often follows some concrete early validation: a working prototype, a small SBIR Phase I award, or an early OTA-funded pilot with a government customer. Because defense-tech products frequently take longer to reach revenue than commercial SaaS, a Seed-stage defense company is often earlier in commercial terms than a Seed-stage SaaS company, even though both carry the same stage label.
This is also why stage alone is an imperfect proxy for how far along a company is — cross-reference a company's stage against its actual contracts and programs rather than relying on the funding label in isolation.